1. Field of the Invention
Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention relate generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to selecting an image to present in connection with search results relating to a news search.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Search engines assist users in locating desired portions of this information by cataloging web documents. Typically, in response to a user's request, a search engine returns links to documents relevant to the request.
Search engines may base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) provided by the user. The goal of a search engine is to identify links to relevant results based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web documents. Web documents that contain the user's search terms are considered “hits” and are returned to the user.
In the case of news documents, users may find it beneficial to see an image in association with the news documents. Oftentimes, however, news documents include multiple images some of which may not be related to the topic of the news documents. This makes it difficult to automatically select appropriate images for the news documents.